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Meta Threatens to Fire Workers for Return-to-Office Infractions in Leaked Memo (sfgate.com) 238

Posted by EditorDavid from the unfriending dept.
In a Thursday memo, Meta's "Head of People" told employees "that their managers would receive their badge data and that repeated violations of the new three-day-a-week requirement could cause workers to lose their jobs," writes SFGate (citing a report from Insider): In June, the Menlo Park-based firm announced its plan to require that most employees work from an office at least three days each week — it goes into effect Sept. 5... Meta confirmed the update to SFGATE... Goler's note on the return-to-office requirements, Insider reports, reads, "As with other company policies, repeated violations may result in disciplinary action, up to and including a Performance rating drop and, ultimately, termination if not addressed."

As for employees who are grandfathered into a remote work arrangement (the firm bars managers from opening more of these positions), the note lays down a strict policy: If remote employees consistently come into the office more than four times every two months outside major events, they'll be shifted to the three-day-a-week plan.

"We believe that distributed work will continue to be important in the future, particularly as our technology improves," a Meta spokesperson said in a statement sent to SFGATE. "In the near-term, our in-person focus is designed to support a strong, valuable experience for our people who have chosen to work from the office, and we're being thoughtful and intentional about where we invest in remote work."
The article notes that Mark Zuckerberg told The Verge in 2020 that Meta would become "the most forward-leaning company on remote work at our scale," speculating that half the company could be permanently remote within a decade.

"However, in 2023, which Zuckerberg dubbed Meta's 'year of efficiency,' employees have seen a remote-first culture melt away. In March, as the executive announced 10,000 layoffs on top of a huge cut in November, he wrote that early-career engineers do better when they're working in person at least three days a week."
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Meta Threatens to Fire Workers for Return-to-Office Infractions in Leaked Memo More

Meta Threatens to Fire Workers for Return-to-Office Infractions in Leaked Memo

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  • I wonder how this will work in (Score:5, Insightful)

    by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Monday August 21, 2023 @03:56AM (#63784026)

    Their Hamburg office, where it would be illegal for them to use badge data for this purpose.

    I know a few people there. I suspect what will be the same as where I work, a string of passive aggressive emails imploring people to return to the office but unable to do anything because line managers don't care about upper management's bullshit.

    • Their Hamburg office, where it would be illegal for them to use badge data for this purpose.

      What makes you think that Meta would not do anything illegal with personal data ? I thought that this was the basis of much of its profits.

      • What makes you think that Meta would not do anything illegal with personal data ?

        A history of fights with the German data privacy regulator. Also there's a difference between fucking over your own employees and screwing idiot consumers. The latter isn't illegal.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Hodr ( 219920 )

      Wait, what? Germany doesn't allow you to track whether or not your employees actually show up to work?

      • Not electronically permanently logging mass collected badge data. You have some rights for privacy even when you're doing work. You also don't get that "employer monitoring my keystrokes" bullshit that happens in other countries either.

        German employee protections and data privacy protections are a tombe of legal gibberish. It's a bit more complicated than the USA's one line: "STFU and get back to work slave."

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        The boss can observe you are there, and even collect some stats themselves. What they can't do is use the building access control system to systematically log the movements of their employees.

  • Isn't it wonderfull (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Casandro ( 751346 ) on Monday August 21, 2023 @03:58AM (#63784030)

    Many people are debating if we should abolish Big-"Tech", now we see those companies voluntarily firing from their most valuable employees because their work management is still stuck in the 20th century. Unfortunately there still quite some momentum behind those companies, but eventually they will fail because of such petty little things like forcing their employees to visit an office where they are often cut off from their colleagues and have a somewhat worse workplace setup.

    This offers new changes for disruption.

    • Many silly people having a deeply unserious conversations.

    • Re:Isn't it wonderfull (Score:4, Insightful)

      by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Monday August 21, 2023 @04:33AM (#63784092) Journal

      Many people are debating if we should abolish Big-"Tech", now we see those companies voluntarily firing from their most valuable employees

      They're not exactly firing their most valuable employees: I don't think there's an especially strong correlation between employee quality and desire to WFH. Strong employees do well anywhere but some prefer being in office, some like being in the office a little bit and others want to never come in. It depends on the working style.

      What they are doing is pissing off all the employees. Even people who like coming into the office regularly chafe against obnoxious rules and lack of trust. So they're not firing the strong employees, they're just trying to piss them off into leaving.

      That's arguable even more stupid :)

      • Qualified employees may or may not like working from home or from an office, but as far as I know, nobody, qualified or not, likes to be on a leading string and constant surveillance if they "behave". If you want to do that, open a nursery, not an office.

        • Yes absolutely. They're intent on pissing off all the employees. The best pores are the most likely to leave. They're even pissing off the good employees who are happy to be in the office.

          Happened to me at my former job.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Junta ( 36770 )

            It's a fairly common approach, when done half way competently, it's correlated with special awards (cash, restricted stock) and maybe side conversations with "key" people to offset the generally discouraging working situation. So an announcement goes out that times are rough and a cash bonus cycle is canceled, but somehow a lot of key people manage to get an even better bonus by special arrangement.

            The rationale is that the company gets to keep up a "we didn't fire anyone" good guy appearance, ease of labo

            • " for clearly key people who aren't coming in, they get to convert to a "remote" employee, and remote employees are explicitly exempted from the metrics."

              Correct. I work for a Silicon Valley company and got a special exemption to the RTO policy at the VP level, and I immediately pulled up stakes and went to work from a 95 acre ranch in Wyoming.

              Being permanent remote is being used by every company in the Valley as a perk to retain their best employees.

      • Re:Isn't it wonderfull (Score:5, Insightful)

        by JaredOfEuropa ( 526365 ) on Monday August 21, 2023 @07:35AM (#63784456) Journal
        If you piss off everybody, whether it's by cutting down on WFH or replacing the 3-ply paper in the toilets with orphanage grade stuff, it's the better employees who tend to leave first. They have options, they might already have gotten a few offers. The deadwood is happy to remain if they can.
    • Actually, the problem is that many in the management layer need for people to be back in the office so that the former can justify their jobs: without people in the office and things chugging along it is obvious to everybody what has been obvious to many of us for a long time: that most of the members of the management layer are nothing but dead weight.

  • Silly isn't it (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rossdee ( 243626 ) on Monday August 21, 2023 @04:01AM (#63784034)

    That all these big tech companies that make their money by getting others to do stuff on the Internet want their own employees to be in the office.

    And never mind that transportation to work generally emits a lot of CO2 and we have to reduce that somehow.

    • That all these big tech companies that make their money by getting others to do stuff on the Internet want their own employees to be in the office.

      And never mind that transportation to work generally emits a lot of CO2 and we have to reduce that somehow.

      The reduced co2 was one of the few good things that came from 2020.

      Don't companies like Fecebook get special deals from the city because they bring footfall?

      Anyhow the Fecebook bubble burst, they have few mid-long term prospects, "news" like this is just to try and get some attention and gauge what little clout they have remaining.

  • Make up your mind! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ls671 ( 1122017 ) on Monday August 21, 2023 @04:02AM (#63784038) Homepage

    As for employees who are grandfathered into a remote work arrangement (the firm bars managers from opening more of these positions), the note lays down a strict policy: If remote employees consistently come into the office more than four times every two months outside major events, they'll be shifted to the three-day-a-week plan.

    Make up your mind! If you want employees to show up in the office, why punish them and make them lose rights if they do show up when they feel like it?

    • It's obviously a trap. They're going to engineer situations where these employees have to attend some kind of in-office face-to-face meetings - but not major events - more than 4 times in 60 days, and then use it as justification to make them 3-day hybrids.

  • Bullying (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Njovich ( 553857 ) on Monday August 21, 2023 @04:40AM (#63784110)

    They made up their mind, they want to bully people. We know from study after study that on all real benchmarks, allowing workers to choose where they work gives best performance. Big companies keep throwing money at the likes of Gartner to make them reports that people perform better at work. Even the pay to win clubs like Gartner still end up not being able to get that data for them, and end up publishing stuff like this: https://www.gartner.com/en/art... [gartner.com]

    A good workspace can maybe make a 1x/2x difference in working, and especially for a company with high wages like Meta, people will have homes that they can work just fine from, so the workplace advantage is zero or even negative as their home is generally way better equipped for their personal tastes. Motivation can easily make employees perform 10 times better. There will never be data that shows that a caged worker will perform better than one that has freedom. They know this but they don't care.

    These 'decisionmakers' just want to control people and make them show up to their cages to jump through some hoops and do a little dance. They don't give a fuck about the company or performance: they already have money. They are just bored and want you to be their little monkey. They force people to show up every day, typically costing employees 2 hours per day in extra preparation and travel time, being miserable in traffic and then sitting in a cubicle (at best, likely just a worker farm), being miserable there more. It's not that these so called 'leaders' don't care about employees suffering, that's all they want.

    Of course for many women and minorities they have a lot less ability to show up to the office at rigid schedules 40 hours per week due to more childcare household responsibilities, making less money that they could use to have someone else take over, and having less money for transportation or at a place where they could easily transport to the office. Also if a white man says 'oh I need to take the morning off to bring my kid to the doctor' they are an 'awesome father', but if a woman or black man does it they 'don't prioritize work'.

    These 'leaders' don't just know this but love it. Nothing they love more than seeing a young woman suffer for their sadistic needs. They love the women coming to be their dancing monkey just as much they love her having to quit her job due to them effectively forcing her to

    • We know from study after study that on all real benchmarks, allowing workers to choose where they work gives best performance.

      Would love to get my hands on these rigorous studies you're referring to...

      Personal, anecdotal, evidence is people don't focus at home and their output is significantly lower, in almost every case bar those tiny few who actually become more productive.

      Team dynamic was equally poor with a significant uptick in HR events during the WFH gap.

      WFH productivity is a fantasy. The vast

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Njovich ( 553857 )

        You can start with the Gartner study I linked? Did you find any particular issues with the methodology?

  • making headlines about exciting new product releases.

    • Even worse than that, Zuck has shown himself to be a terrible entrepreneur. Granted, he is a good businessman, as he has kept Facebook alive, but he has absolute failed at any kind of new initiative that did not involve buying an already successful startup (and even then...).

      He has terrible vision about the future combined with an apparent incompetence when it comes to building a team that can deliver. Given that we just went through a decade of free money, when nobody cared about profitability and you coul

      • He's the same kind of bullshit artist as all of the current "entrepreneurs". He got lucky once, hit the jackpot and that's it. Everything else is inertia.

        I have no idea why we pay any attention to what these people say. We can as well get business suggestions from people who hit the lottery jackpot.

        • For sure he got lucky, but I don't doubt that he's a decent businessman. It takes skill to buy out strategic competitors and carefully use anti-competitive strategies to keep others out. I don't think they're very noble skills, but that is the business world we have created, and I don't doubt that people like Bill Gates and Zuck are damn good at navigating it.

  • It's a way of reducing staff numbers without having to pay out on any redundancy packages. F*** yeah says management. A year or two later, "Why can't we attract decent candidates?"

    • Re:Redundancy? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Monday August 21, 2023 @06:42AM (#63784350)

      Worse, the question will actually be "Why is nothing working anymore?"

      Because you lost all your good people. Everyone who knows his shit is gone, because they can easily find new jobs. What you retain is the duds that can't find their own ass with both hands because they cannot. They have to grin and bear it, they have to swallow whatever you throw their way because they can't just flip you off and start somewhere else, because they are useless.

      And that's what you retain with that kind of policy.

  • Just like since the beginning of the year, this is yet another company looking to use employee's unwillingness to come back to the old model as just cause and "suggestive" layoff for them cutting costs. Why fire when you can just get a large chunk of your workforce to consider costs and work-life-balance impacts to change jobs?

    I've seen this happen in my country: companies cutting cost-less or cost-trivial benefits which have 0 impact on productivity, just to tip employees to going for other non-greener pas

    • Then fire the duds. Fire them. Throw the garbage out, cut the slack, trim the fat.

      What this accomplishes is the opposite. You get the good workers to move on to greener pastures and what you're stuck with is the ones that cannot.

  • If you don't like the policy shouldn't you quit? Rather than just violate the policy and hope you don't get busted? Seems like a weird and very dysfunctional dynamic.

    • that's Meta's goal: reduction of staff through suggestive quitting.

      • That makes sense. It is cheaper than firing people and paying severance. But it seems like making your own employees miserable so they quit is not a good policy either. Also dysfunctional. And you lose control over which ones leave and which ones stay.

        • >it seems like making your own employees miserable so they quit is not a good policy either.

          From a 'make employees happy' perspective? Because they only care about the money, and often a consultant is hired who tells them exactly how to get the most people to leave for the least expense... which inevitably means making them miserable enough to jump.

          Of course, that means only your most desperate and probably least productive employees hang on, so it's pretty dumb from a workforce quality perspective as w

    • Violate the policy, hope you do get busted, hope to get fired, then sue them.

      That's what they're probably going to do in Hamburg at least.

  • Collaboration for me, but not for thee? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by nicolaiplum ( 169077 ) on Monday August 21, 2023 @06:22AM (#63784280)

    So let me get this right:

    If you're not a old-timer remote person, you are required to come to the office often and collaborate because it has great business benefits (says Zuck)?

    If you are an old-timer remote person, you are forbidden to come to the office often and collaborate, even though it has great business benefits (says Zuck)?

    This is looking an awful lot like just wanting to order people around, and not actually being interested in what benefits the business, Zuck?

    Now, about the business benefits of your legless Metaverse....

  • What do they do in these offices anyways? Rake the piles of money so Zuckerberg can roll in it?

  • Free Layoffs (Score:4, Informative)

    by furry_wookie ( 8361 ) on Monday August 21, 2023 @07:20AM (#63784442)
    Every time you hear a company do this remember what this really is.....it's a free layoff without having to pay unemployment or severance.

    I am convinced all the back to work games are all attempts by desperate companies to get people to quit because it's intimately cheaper than laying someone off.

    • Re:Free Layoffs (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Monday August 21, 2023 @07:53AM (#63784484)

      It's not. It's insanely expensive. You retain the duds and get rid of the people who do the actual work. Because they are the ones that will easily find something new (and better) while those without skills have to stay and accept the new terms.

      And getting the ones that actually do work again is far harder than retaining them.

      • Corporations don't care. It's all about the next quarterly report. Long term consequences like that don't enter into the thinking at all.

        • That's one of the things that make me wonder why the hell corporations can even be competitive. Nobody in a corporation gives a damn about it, nobody cares about anything. Any single businessperson should be more successful simply due to giving a damn about their business.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Junta ( 36770 )

        Depends, in my office they are clearly headed for more of a Facebook like ultimatum, but at the same time key people are being converted to "remote" employees, exempt from the mandate.

        It's not as *much* control over the labor that leaves, but if a company *thinks* that like 80% of their workforce is about equally painful to do away with, they could target attrition to get rid of 'any 5% within that 80%' while taking the 20% aside and giving them exemptions and bonuses to counter the deliberately morale erod

  • > he wrote that early-career engineers do better when they're working in person at least three days a week.

    Where's the evidence for this?

  • this is why we can't have nice things (Score:3)

    by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Monday August 21, 2023 @07:53AM (#63784486) Journal

    A certain standard exists.
    An extraordinary situation happens requiring employers to accommodate that situation if they want to keep running their business, and employees to accommodate it in order to keep getting paid.
    Extraordinary situation ends.
    Now some people want to continue the extraordinary practices because they like it better.

    Hint: if you are in a disaster area, and someone comes around handing out food and blankets, that doesn't mean you get free food and blankets FOREVER, even if you "like it much better" that way.

  • Cities and states grant billions in tax incentives to US companies to open offices in their area and employers are at risk of losing out on lucrative incentives.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MTEK ( 2826397 )

      Maybe I'm being naive, but why not be honest about that? Not that I ever plan to work for FB (or Amazon), but these bullshit explanations give me trust issues.

  • Good luck getting people to come back into 'Open Office Layout' hell that can only be reached by public transit. I remember during dotcom haydays many of us had actual offices with doors and almost everyone else had a decent full-sized cubicle. Plus a lot of on-site amenities, including free on-site parking.
  • This is good news! Remember, loyalty isn't valid corporate currency, in that it's more like Camel-bucks. Start your new life free of Meta. Go ahead and use whatever cache that offers to get yourself new employment with better acting humans that can level with you as a actual person and put yourself in a position deserving of your self-respect. People that want you to have the same thing they have--free of strings, and dingle-berries, and white knights.

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